SCIENCE science.orgJurisdictional and regional approaches,
which aim to align governments, businesses,
nongovernmental organizations, and local
stakeholders around common goals for land
management within an administrative unit,
are becoming more common and offer
possibilities for overcoming some of the
shortcomings of a project-based approach
[see ( 9 ) for examples]. Implementation of
a jurisdictional approach faces hurdles in
places with poor governance, corruption,
and lack of enforcement, but these ap-
proaches potentially provide an alternative
to individual projects if participants in the
carbon market can overcome these hurdles.
Unlike individual project-based efforts,
jurisdictions or region-wide organizations
can foster low-GHG land management
through credit and access to inputs for
land users to alter feed for livestock, plant
trees on farms, improve fertilizer manage-
ment, eliminate crop residue burning, or
other practices that require upfront in-
vestments. These efforts would be coupled
with enforced regulations within jurisdic-
tions against illegal deforestation and fire
and other incentives to foster a transition
to low-GHG land management. For ex-
ample, municipality-level initiatives in the
Brazilian Amazon successfully reduced
deforestation by linking credit to farmers
with municipality-level deforestation rates
to implement the federal Plan to Prevent
and Control Amazon Deforestation.
A carbon market that purchases credits
from land users in jurisdictions that pro-
mote low-GHG land management could
also help address the existing disincentive
to potential suppliers from high transactions
costs. More land users in a jurisdiction could
aggregate their projects and reduce costs.
Supply of high-quality carbon credits has
been hampered by high costs for individual
project development, monitoring, and other
transactions ( 10 ). Small-scale farmers, which
globally constitute 84% of all farmers ( 11 ),
and Indigenous communities, which manage
a quarter of the world’s land area ( 12 ), are
at a disadvantage to participate in the cur-
rent carbon market, yet could make outsized
contributions to effective climate mitigation.
Pooled capabilities at a jurisdictional or re-
gional scale to develop, monitor, and report
could help facilitate participation of small-
scale land users and promote durable trans-
formation in land management.
Although the evidence base is only begin-
ning to develop, jurisdictional and regional
approaches potentially lower transaction
costs and reduce, though do not eliminate,
problems of additionality and leakage ( 9 ). At
a project level, additionality is compromised
when voluntary participation in response to
an economic incentive is biased toward land
users who already intended to change prac-
tices. This “adverse selection” problem dimin-
ishes as actors are grouped within larger ju-
risdictions and jurisdiction-wide support for
low-GHG land management enables other
land users to participate. Ambitious baselines
below business as usual and dynamic adjust-
ments in a structure predefined by crediting
institutions could help reduce the problem
of adverse selection at a jurisdictional level.
Jurisdiction-wide monitoring alleviates the
problem of leakage within jurisdictions be-
cause credits are issued only for net changes
at the jurisdictional scale. Leakage could still
occur with neighboring jurisdictions and
across national boundaries, a problem that
also occurs with project-based markets and
which is very difficult to quantify and address
through market or other mechanisms.
High-resolution remote sensing and
artificial intelligence provide a new, low-
cost way for jurisdictions and regions to
monitor land management at a parcel level
repeatedly across large areas. Many com-
panies are pursuing means to both track
land-use changes and combine that infor-
mation with payment delivery platforms
that land users can access through mobile
phones. Efforts to pool project develop-
ment, technical advice, monitoring, and
payments are more feasible now than in
the early days of the Clean Development
Mechanism and voluntary carbon market.
These tools can enable markets globally
and help ensure that credits represent ac-
tual climate mitigation.
Despite these potential benefits of ju-
risdictional and regional approaches for
changing land management norms across
large areas and addressing additional-
ity and leakage, an overriding concern
for both project-based and jurisdictional
approaches is the need for fair and equi-
table benefit sharing. Land rights and gov-
ernance are deeply political and involve
entrenched power dynamics ( 13 ). It is un-
realistic to expect that the carbon market
can resolve centuries-old problems of inse-
cure land rights and procedural injustice.
As a small step toward the larger goal of
reducing these injustices, buyers on the
carbon market can insist that strong and
verified social safeguards, principles of
informed consent, and fair benefit shar-
ing are enforced as fundamental require-
ments for registration. These safeguards
are not currently applied uniformly across
the standards for certifying credits for the
voluntary carbon market ( 14 ). Even when
safeguards are applied, they are not a
guarantee against unfair and inequitable
practices, particularly where governments
control forest lands that local people use
customarily. More rigor is needed to be ableto assure buyers that they are purchasing
from places where land conflicts and gov-
ernance are fairly and equitably managed.
Where governance structures make such
efforts possible, jurisdictional and regional
approaches potentially reduce transaction
costs for developing baselines, monitoring,
and reporting; enable wider participation
from land users; shift land use norms; and
enhance integrity for buyers in the volun-
tary carbon market. As jurisdictional ap-
proaches are rapidly evolving, the research
community plays a key role in developing
the evidence base about problems and suc-
cesses in implementation, particularly re-
garding fair and equitable benefit sharing
in places with insecure land rights.
The urgency of the climate crisis de-
mands effective interventions to reduce,
avoid, and remove emissions in all sectors.
Low-GHG land management is not a pana-
cea. Yet, with efforts to reduce and remove
emissions in other sectors, it can contrib-
ute to a durable transformation toward
addressing the crisis while providing local
benefits for people and ecosystems. jREFERENCES AND NOTES- I. So, M. Elias, B. Haya, Voluntary Registry Offsets
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
S.P.H., D.R.G., and S.K. were supported through a gift to
Environmental Defense Fund from the Bezos Earth Fund. S.
Schwartzman and R. Lubowski provided helpful comments
on the manuscript. The research was conducted when N.P.’s
affiliation was Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and
Environment, Bengaluru, India.
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